To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. For all Bower’s eagerness to put a kind gloss on Johnson’s actions, he doesn’t flinch from the man’s record. A better subtitle might have been The Blamer. Click and Collect from your local Waterstones or get FREE UK delivery on orders over £25. The onetime Telegraph diarist Quentin Letts is struck that Johnson never passed on any gossip: “He doesn’t notice people’s quirks and their embarrassments,” Letts observes, which Bower puts down to Johnson’s “narcissism”: he’s just not that interested in anyone other than himself. Boris Johnson : The Gambler by Tom Bower . This same generosity marks Bower’s description, in two lengthy chapters, of Johnson’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic. Johnson is after all the most accomplished liar in public life - perhaps the … Johnson Snr is faithless and a creep: in the parched summer of 1976, he told the family’s two au pairs that the water shortage made washing clothes impossible and therefore they would have to follow the lead set by him and his wife and walk around naked, which they duly did. Tom Bower made his name as a writer of acid-pen biographies and his latest is no exception. It’s a hatchet job. Anyone expecting an unsparing, detached appraisal of our Prime Minister will be disappointed, says a former Johnson biographer, Sonia Purnell. Boris Johnson: The Gambler by Tom Bower. “History remembers Boris.” In a statement that neatly encapsulates the ethos of the post-truth era that Johnson’s spell in Brussels anticipated, Telegraph executive Jeremy Deedes insists his correspondent might have been “exaggerating but it was all too good to check. Boris Johnson during a parliamentary session on Covid. Bower portrays him as an absent father and violent husband, who punched his wife so hard he broke her nose. Perhaps it is no surprise, then, that Bower appears to be on a mission to explain why the blond bombshell has not (yet) proved to be a political messiah. • Boris Johnson: The Gambler is published by WH Allen (£20). Naturally, Stanley began sleeping with one of the two young women, in full knowledge of his children. In Bower’s telling, Johnson Snr is a lifelong flake: dabbling in jobs, failing at most of them, then using his connections to find something else. According to this biography, Boris Johnson is psychologically cracked from top to bottom and smashed to pieces. The affairs, the lies, the shoddy handling of coronavirus …. Boris Johnson: The Gambler review – no blame, ... • Boris Johnson: The Gambler by Tom Bower is published by WH Allen (£20). Similarly, Bower concedes that Johnson once wrote of “grinning picaninnies” with “watermelon smiles” and, for good measure, digs out a line that Johnson’s critics missed: “Some dream of their teeth falling out as they are about to be executed with the scimitar by a beautiful black woman.” But none of this should be understood as evidence of racism, which for Bower would be “unusual” in a man married “to a half-Indian woman”. His 24 bestselling books encompass a remarkably wide range of subjects. His reports were all correct in spirit if not in detail.”. Boris Johnson, October 23, 2020 In the most recent issue of The Times Literary Supplement , Rory Stewart, former Tory minister, described Boris Johnson, the current Prime Minister of the UK, as follows: “Johnson is after all the most accomplished liar in public life … Many of us think we know his story well. This book makes a good stab at answering the question, “What makes Boris Johnson tick?” By the end, we have a sense of what void Johnson with his restless ambition is seeking to fill. Boris Johnson: The Gambler by Tom Bower . To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Stanley Johnson’s sense of entitlement was fed by his ability repeatedly to fail upward, but he’s hardly alone in this story. It’s all there: the affairs, the lies, the broken promises, the unpaid debts. DESCRIPTION. ), Repeatedly, he grants Johnson the benefit of the doubt. Find books He is especially scathing about the government’s scientific advisers, who gave the PM duff advice. But then most high-achievers in their fifties have long since moved on from blaming the flaws of their parents for their own misdeeds, especially when they have been blessed with a great deal of love and support from others along the way. Johnson was surely “satirising neocolonialism”. Charlotte, who eventually had a breakdown and was hospitalised, says of her son: “I have often thought that his being ‘world king’ was a wish to make himself unhurtable, invincible, somehow safe from the pains of your mother disappearing for eight months.” Apparently Boris Johnson’s long-suffering second wife, the human rights lawyer Marina Wheeler, took a similar view: “She unhesitatingly rebuked Stanley for her husband’s sins.”, It’s a reading – Boris as victim – which is helpful for Bower who, it soon becomes clear, wants to write a forgiving portrait of his subject. Even once he’d committed to Brexit, he argued that it made no sense for Britain to leave the single market – a position he would casually jettison once it suited him. His ruthless ambition was evident from his insistence, as a three-year-old, that he would one day be ‘world king’. It is symptomatic of the darkness of this book that makes you want to close it and never look at it again. Tom Bower made his name as a writer of acid-pen biographies and his latest is no exception. Browse The Guardian Bookshop for a big selection of Politics books and the latest book reviews from The Guardian and The Observer Buy Boris Johnson 9780753554906 by Tom Bower for only £17.4 Contains a string of startling revelations about Mr Johnson's public and personal life, and goes farther than any previous biography towards solving the enigma of his true personality. That question is not “Why does Johnson behave this way?” but rather, “Why do we put up with it?”. Boris Johnson by Tom Bower. There is yet more evidence that Johnson scarcely believes in anything. This was a secret Santa gift, (paperback) & having given Johnson's truly awful 'The Churchill Factor' a one-star review, ... Tom Bower (born 28 September 1946) is a British writer, noted for his investigative journalism and for his unauthorized biographies. Johnson’s hero, Winston Churchill, did that with the entire war effort, from the manufacture of armaments to military strategy. There are some new nuggets – I’d happily have read more about Johnson’s fisticuffs with George Osborne when the two men were in a lift together during a visit to China – and some useful insights. Bower suggests that Stanley’s mistreatment of Boris’s mother, Charlotte, is the defining secret of the Johnson family and the fact that Boris, as the oldest child, witnessed it is the key to understanding his character, including his rampant ambition. The affairs, the lies, the shoddy handling of coronavirus … Johnson is let off the hook in this biography – it’s his father, Stanley, who emerges as the villain, Last modified on Tue 13 Oct 2020 09.14 EDT. And to save you the pain of wading through this depressing saga of lies, betrayals, amorality, jealousy, xenophobia, misogyny and depression depicted in a book subtitled The Gambler, I will tell you why now: it’s everyone else’s fault. Photograph: Jessica Taylor/UK Parliament Handout/EPA. Bower adopts the Dominic Cummings position that Britain is run by unqualified and useless civil servants and bureaucrats and it’s they, not Johnson, who messed up. Except the hatchet is aimed not at the man whose name is on the cover, but rather at his father. WH Allen £20 Review by Sarah Sands Just this week, Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced that he will put Manchester into Tier 3 lockdown, whether it likes it or not, … When Johnson edits the Spectator, “applications for employment bereft of nepotism or patronage were automatically binned”. And yet, isn’t that what leadership is about? Author: Tom Bower. But that leaves a larger question untouched, one less about the politician than about the people who vote for him. He takes no interest in his children’s upbringing, except to communicate a couple of life lessons: “If you’re working hard, don’t show it … show effortless superiority”; and “Nothing matters very much and most things don’t matter at all.”, All this is laid out in the opening chapters, inviting the reader to see the prime minister as the inevitably damaged product of a morally inadequate father. Critic after critic is dismissed as consumed by envy or pomposity — and yet where vision and empathy should be there is emptiness. Add to basket. His takedown of Robert Maxwell was hailed as a masterclass exposé of a rogue. Download books for free. It is also apparently Boris Johnson’s “stern” first wife Allegra’s fault for being too “demanding” — such as hoping for emotional support when her parents split up — when he needed all her attention himself without the onus of repayment. They might indeed be advised to skip the first 526 pages to the back-of-the-book admission that Boris Johnson is “not a stranger in my home”. Boris Johnson: The Gambler by Tom Bower (WH Allen, £20), Sonia Purnell is author of Just Boris: A Tale of Blond Ambition and A Woman of No Importance, Jennifer Arcuri 'admits to affair with Boris Johnson', Covid jab causes side effects in more than a third, study finds, Victim celebrating £5k payday stabbed five times with Rambo knife, ‘Comedy gold’: Angry parish council meeting becomes internet hit, Hotel quarantines: Full list of nations affected by new travel rules, London Covid cases: Infection rates highest in west of the capital. (His biography of the last Labour prime minister spoke firmly of “Brown” rather than “Gordon”. It’s a hatchet job. By James Mahon in Review on November 9, 2020. His most recent books include the most authoritative and best-selling account of Tony Blair’s decade as prime minister and the definitive biographies of Gordon Brown and Geoffrey … It's all there : the affairs, the lies, the broken promises, the unpaid debts. The villain of the piece is Stanley Johnson. It was Stanley’s fault for being a bad father. om Bower made his name as a writer of acid-pen biographies and his latest is no exception. It’s a small world. Bower moves between business tycoons, newspaper proprietors and politicians, and if the two-word appetiser … Boris Johnson: The Gambler by Tom Bower review – the defining secret. Admittedly, it sounds like he was, and an atrocious husband too, having broken his first wife’s nose in a row while embarking on a half-crazed campaign for maximum sexual conquests. Boris Johnson during a parliamentary session on Covid. These pages are somewhat out of place in a biography – they are a perfectly competent summary of the news events of the last few months, but sit awkwardly in a portrait of a life – but they have one unifying theme: namely, it’s not Johnson’s fault. Most annoying of all was the way in which the author allowed his personal opinions to inform almost every aspect of this book. The book also provides a perhaps inadvertent portrait of one corner of the British elite. Delivery charges may apply. TOM BOWER: It pains me to say this but Boris Johnson, exhausted and looking increasingly forlorn, appears to have a few short weeks to salvage his reputation from ridicule. I did not read the book to learn about how Tom Bower thinks. He yearns for the spotlight, happy to trade off the fame of his son if that will get him attention. As divisive as he is beguiling, as misunderstood as he is scrutinised, Boris Johnson is a singular figure. Bower’s recitation of the failures of, for example, Public Health England is certainly damning of that body, but surely the task of leaders is to get a grip when something is not working. Rory Stewart does not so much review Tom Bower's biography of Boris Johnson for the TLS as brush the book aside to get at its subject himself. The villain of the piece is Stanley Johnson. “On what basis could a politician question the experts’ apparent unanimity?” asks Bower, suggesting that of recent prime ministers only the chemistry graduate, Margaret Thatcher, would have been in a position to do such a thing. Bower reminds us that Johnson, who headed a Vote Leave campaign that falsely warned that Turkey was poised to join the EU, had made a TV documentary in 2008 advocating Turkey’s accession to the EU. Tellingly, he is “Boris” throughout, a courtesy not extended to previous Bower subjects. Boris Johnson by Tom Bower, review — he just wants to be loved. Guardian 'literary highlights of 2020' Sunday Times 'books to watch out for in 2020' New Statesman 'books to read in 2020' Evening Standard 'thirteen titles to look for in 2020' Tom Bower is acknowledged as Britain's leading investigative writer. Sure, when he was the Telegraph’s correspondent in Brussels, serving up comedy EU tales of bureaucrats dictating the right size of a condom or the correct curvature of a banana, his colleagues believed he was a charlatan and a liar, making stuff up, but Bower says they were “an undistinguished pack” and, after all, who remembers any of them? Officials, aides, junior ministers, Cabinet colleagues, the Foreign Office and the BBC have all let Johnson down — in Bower-view it is always their fault, never Johnson’s own. 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